The Community 2: The Invisible Hand

Here’s something likely to be of interest to my sorts of readers, I think, a new Korean reality show that started a few weeks ago on KOCOWA+ just as I let my sub run out after Bloody Game finished, but that I might resub and binge when the whole thing has gone out – I’ve seen the first two episodes and I don’t want to overuse the word ‘interesting’, but it’s really interesting (unfortunately it’s also come out at time where there’s loads of other things competing for my time). It is also, I suspect, quite complex for an average Western viewer – there are lots of different moving parts, the first two episodes are around 1h 40m, the third one seems to be 3h.

The first series of The Community worked slightly differently, the group of politically diverse people have to make decisions for the common good but if you can state another contestant’s persuasions correctly you can eliminate them, and this new version whilst being a different game seems to have become popular enough that KOCOWA has bought and translated the first series off the back of it, I understand. This one certainly begins as a economics 101 lesson which aims to test Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand theory, will you get as balanced society that succeeds if everyone works in their own self interest? I’ll hide the rules from the first two episodes behind a cut. Because there’s a lot.

If I’ve made mistakes here apologies, it was a week ago and there are lots of numbers.

• The show begins with each player, 13, taking a morality questionnaire, broadly putting everyone on a sort of left/right spectrum on three different layers. They’re advised to keep the results to themselves. Everyone has a nickname they are referred to throughout.
• The Community consists of a White House (six people), A Blue House (three people), a Red House (three people), a Community Centre (where trades are officially made and lives/written instructions submitted) and a Town Hall, which houses the Supermarket (run by Team Black as a one-man band) which sells food. Everyone must meet for dinner in the TH every night.
• Each house specialises in a different resource and begins the game with loads in one but not much in the others. Each house must also nominate a leader every morning.
• The White House controls the prize fund. This is set at $200,000 and is initially represented by 200 diamonds, each one worth $1,000 at the end of the game. However every day they can issue up to 200 further diamonds, diluting their value – with 400 in play, each diamond is only worth $500, for example.
• The Blue House controls Lives. At the end of each day, the Team Leaders must submit one life (they look like blue cartridges) to the Community Centre for each person in their team – if they cannot or will not then people not covered will be eliminated UNLESS they are the last person standing in their team, in which case they no longer need to submit lives. At the first production task The Blue team are also privy to the total amount of lives available in the game. It will not be quite enough for everyone to get through the nine days.
• The Red House controls credits which represent the means of production – not an awful lot of use in the first day, but useful going forward. A credit must be used every time two houses want to make a trade.
• Trading is done at the Community Centre, the leaders put their items in boxes, the contents are verfied by producers and then the boxes swapped. It does not look like verbal agreements are binding so in theory you could short change in a trade.
• The Black House controls the shop and sets the prices. He must submit a life every day in order to open up the shop but can’t trade for them. People catch on quite quickly that his singular aim suggests there’s not much downside and there must be a catch. The merchant is only person who is aware of how many of each resource each team has got.
• Day two introduces more complexity. Each team is given a “key and lock” puzzle which I didn’t quite understand but it involves famous economic quotes, solving them earns some sort of improvement of their powers – the White team can unlock digital currency, which means they no longer are limited to a 200 diamond issue every day. The red team can create bombs – swap ten credits for a bomb which will remove three lives from a team. Can’t remember what the Blue innovation was, sorry. The shopkeeper also has these same puzzles and if he solves them before the teams, they have to buy the innovation from him. He can’t otherwise use them.
• Production. Each day there’s a way for teams to produce lives and credits in a task – I don’t know if it’s a same or different task every day, but the first one involved 10 light What? Where? When? style questions. It cost one credit to take part in the task. If you wanted a hint for a question, or you wanted to submit a different answer, you have to submit a credit. Each house has a choice of reward – lives or credits, for correct answers, earning more if you choose your house speciality. The White House has the least earning potential (although can win bonuses if they sweep all ten) as they still only have a lives/credit choice, their return is poorer.
• The Red House discovers that they can take three credits per correct answer, or they can take two “pollution free” credits instead. Unknown to everybody, every time a credit gets used it goes towards a secret pollution clock, and when it fills up an unknown disaster will happen. The merchant on the face of it doesn’t seem to know what this level is.
• War. After production on the second day, the rules for declaring war are sent to players. If a team declines trade on a day, they can instead opt to go to war to claim half of all the resources of the losing team by paying an amount of diamonds (removing their value from the game) at the Community Centre and declaring war. Teams may ally up with each other. How a war is fought I don’t know. But it involves three grades of weapons that can be bought
• But there are things we are told. The price of war is secretly set by the Shopkeeper (Team Black) who also sets the price of the weapons. And has also been spying on the house’s front rooms from behind the scenes all the time. Whatsmore we’re told the Shopkeeper’s true intention – the diamonds they take from selling food have no value to him. However the money made on selling weapons very much does and he has a secret room in the Community Centre where he secretly does all his war wheeling and dealing, and if this room is discovered then he loses all the money.
• To add balance, each house has a secret coded message painted on their wall hinting at the secret room. Presumably it will be much easier to find if the three houses can come together to figure it out, but will they?
• Especially as… one of the contestants is a Mole who gets to split the money. The Shopkeeper doesn’t immediately know who it is, but they have a specific response to a specific question which will give them away.

As someone with a basic interest in economics (how do you satisfy unlimited wants with limited resources?) I watched the first episode and thought “oh this is quite interesting”, but it really shows its teeth as a game by episode two – really intrigued to see what direction it ends up taking.